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Television/Radio; The Games People Played in a Simpler Time

I'M GOING to eat lots of chocolate now,'' an actress friend of mine announced, apropos of nothing, at the end of a recent e-mail. I knew how she felt. You can only derive so much comfort from high-mindedness, and in the twitchy weeks since Sept. 11 most of my friends have succumbed to the urge to gobble ''chocolate'' of one sort or another -- edible, aesthetic, even sexual. So if the day's news has got you down, let me steer you to a tasty piece of mind candy guaranteed not to cause acne, obesity or herpes: ''Black and White Overnight,'' a two-hour block of old prime-time game shows that can be seen from 4 to 6 each morning on the Game Show Network.

''Black and White Overnight'' consists of ancient kinescopes of ''What's My Line?,'' ''I've Got a Secret'' and ''To Tell the Truth,'' three of the most successful game shows ever produced. ''What's My Line?,'' the best of them, actually had a 17-year run on CBS -- all but the first few months of it in a single time slot, Sundays at 10:30, right after Ed Sullivan and ''Candid Camera.'' (Eat your heart out, Regis.) Largely forgotten save by wizened aficionados of early television, these programs, all of which were broadcast live from New York, were once as central to pop culture as ''Friends'' is today, and two of their catch phrases, ''Sign in, please'' and ''Will the real . . . please stand up?'' remain in use, though few who use them now could tell you where they came from.

The basic premise of ''What's My Line?,'' which made its debut in 1950, was elegantly simple. The first two guests each week were ordinary people with odd jobs: professional egg-breakers, dynamite manufacturers, makers of square manhole covers. John Charles Daly, the avuncular host, invited them to ''sign in, please,'' whereupon they would scrawl their names on a blackboard, take a seat and submit to yes-or-no questioning by four panelists who tried to guess what they did for a living, with each ''no'' answer winning them $5. After the middle commercial, the panelists put on blindfolds and sought to identify the Mystery Guest, a celebrity who disguised his voice in an attempt, usually but not always unsuccessful, to fox his inquisitors.

The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity -- the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age. But mostly it came from the droll byplay of the panel and guests. Of the three longest-serving regular panelists, Arlene Francis, a stage actress turned small-screen personality, exuded unfeigned warmth, while Dorothy Kilgallen, a bite-the-jugular newspaper reporter and columnist, and Bennett Cerf, the gentleman president of Random House, played the game to win. The wild-card fourth panelist was sometimes a nimble-witted comedian (Fred Allen and Steve Allen both had long runs on the show), sometimes a celebrity of another sort (Van Cliburn, Moss Hart, John Lindsay and Gore Vidal were among the more surprising occupants of the fourth chair).

As for the Mystery Guest, ''What's My Line?'' was so hot in its heyday that it was able to book pretty much anybody it wanted: Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stars with ultra-familiar voices would struggle mightily but vainly to disguise them (Louis Armstrong never had a chance), invariably reducing the studio audience to a puddle of laughter. Trickery was encouraged -- Jack Paar lisped his answers through a bullhorn, Paul Muni played his on a violin -- and on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday evening, Bob Hope succeeded in persuading the panel that he was really Bing Crosby.

The success of ''What's My Line?'' inspired its makers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, to create a pair of knockoffs that were almost as effective as their model. ''I've Got a Secret,'' with Garry Moore as host, was a near-clone of ''What's My Line?,'' only much looser in format. The contestants were mainly of the believe-it-or-not type -- including the last living person to have witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln -- while the celebrity guests engaged in manic stunts dreamed up by Allan Sherman, the producer, who later earned his own place in the annals of pop culture by recording ''Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!'' (On one episode, the secret of an alarmingly young Paul Newman was that he had sold the panelist Henry Morgan a hot dog that afternoon at a World Series game.) ''To Tell the Truth,'' by contrast, was a more sedate affair in which the panel sought to figure out which one of the three contestants was the Real Mr. So-and-So and which were impostors.

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To watch these shows today is to rummage through a cultural time capsule, sealed shut in a more innocent time and now broken open for our delectation and wonder. Garry Moore puffs away on a Winston throughout each episode of ''I've Got a Secret,'' blissfully ignorant of the fact that his sponsor's product would someday kill him. The Mystery Guest on a ''What's My Line?'' originally shown in 1960 turns out to be Jane Fonda, then known not as Hanoi Jane or Mrs. Ted Turner but as the fresh-faced, ingenuous star of ''Tall Story.'' (Bennett Cerf recognized her voice.)

Indeed, much of the charm of ''What's My Line?'' arises from the fact that it is so palpably of another era. The pace was slowish and agreeable, the repartee good-humored but unabashedly urbane. The host and panel all wore evening dress; John Daly addressed his female colleagues as Miss Arlene and Miss Dorothy. The set was penny-plain, the guests signed in on a dime store blackboard and Daly kept score by flipping cards. The contestants, who were treated with the utmost courtesy, were clearly content to earn a mere $50 for stumping the panel. Even though all 876 episodes were originally broadcast live, it never occurs to you for a moment that anyone on stage would have dreamed of saying anything naughty.

Perhaps most strikingly, the collegial bonhomie of the participants leaves you with the distinct impression that the show is taking place in a parallel universe of famous people who all know and like one another and probably stroll over to the Algonquin for a drink afterward. Or so, at least, it seemed to me when young, sitting in front of a black-and-white TV in the living room of a small house in a small town in southeast Missouri. Not a few of my fantasies about life in New York derived from watching ''What's My Line?'' every Sunday, a privilege subject to parental suspension in case of high crimes or misdemeanors. Gil Fates, the executive producer, once wrote a book about the show, and I was pleased to learn from it that when Barbra Streisand was the Mystery Guest in 1965, she confessed to Fates that ''as a little girl she was allowed to watch 'What's My Line?' on Sunday nights only if her homework was finished for school the next day.'' Nobody is so star-struck as a star in the making.

Alas, ''What's My Line?,'' ''I've Got a Secret'' and ''To Tell the Truth'' fell afoul of the rise of demography-driven programming in the mid-60's. By then, most of their regular viewers were on the middle-aged side, so CBS canceled all three programs in 1967 as part of a youth-oriented housecleaning. For the very last ''What's My Line?,'' the producers finally decided to play the hole card they had held in reserve for 17 years in case of a one-minute-to-airtime emergency, sending in John Daly to double as the final Mystery Guest. A week later, ''Mission: Impossible'' took over the time slot; a year later, ''What's My Line?'' resurfaced in a dumbed-down daytime version that ran for seven charmless seasons, after which it expired for good. (''To Tell the Truth'' and ''I've Got a Secret'' have lately been revived in equally unsatisfying versions, the former in syndication and the latter on Oxygen.)

Now John, Arlene, Dorothy and Bennett have obligingly returned from the dead to remind us of an age when life was somewhat simpler and a lot classier. Mind you, it's a tenuous resurrection: though there must be a few nostalgic insomniacs out there, the number of fanatics prepared to tape ''Black and White Overnight'' and watch it the next day is doubtless minuscule to the point of invisibility. Be that as it may, I gladly number myself among them, and I couldn't be more grateful to the Game Show Network for exhuming one of the sweeter memories of my happy childhood. Better than chocolate? Maybe not quite, but at a time when turning on the TV can almost always be counted on to send my blood pressure flying skyward, I can't think of a more soul-soothing experience than watching last night's Mystery Guest sign in, please.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2001, on Page 2002011 of the National edition with the headline: Television/Radio; The Games People Played in a Simpler Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe